Every year, students in the AP statistics classed have a final group project for which they have to carry out a survey or an experiment to answer a research question using statistics they learned throughout the year, senior Ravi Sekhara said.
The statistics project was mainly split up into doing a study, making a final research report, and presenting it to the class, senior Harish Manukonda said.
“We had to design and conduct an experiment or an observational study, and then detail our process throughout and also come up with a final research report,” Manukonda said. “We then statistically analyzed the results to see if they’re significant or not.”
The statistics project is unique because of how open the project is and how much freedom you have with it, Sekhara said.
“The project is very different from other classes because you have to really create the project on your own and carry it out instead of being given something to do,” Sekhara said. “You’re already given a set of instructions, so there’s more creativity and leeway.”
For Sekhara’s project, his group decided to test if there was an association between students’ obedience and their taking advanced classes, he said.
“We knew we were going to do the project for the entire year, so maybe like a week or two before the project, we started brainstorming ideas,” Sekhara said. “We just randomly one day came across the conversation of obedience from AP psychology, and then we came up upon obedience and number of advanced classes.”
Sekhara’s group would pick a random person, tell them that they are trying to see a correlation between jump distance and advanced classes, but there was a twist, he said.
“We would have them jump then tell them we forgot something and we would run away,” Sekhara said. “We would have someone else nearby, watching them with a timer to see how long before they would move. Once they moved, the timer would stop, and we would inform them on the real experiment.”
The purpose of Manukonda’s project is to determine if a placebo is more effective if you sign a contract or without signing a contract, he said.
“So basically, we give a placebo pill that does nothing but we tell them it helps with memory,” Manukonda said. “We tell them it’s supposed to make them better at memory and then we give them a memory test.”
Either they get nothing and just take the memory test, they take the placebo and take the memory test, or they take a placebo and they also sign a waiver about the placebo then take the memory test.
“We haven’t tabulated all the results yet, but just from looking at it, there isn’t that much of a difference between the placebo and the placebo with the contract, but there seems to be some difference,” Manukonda said.
Manukonda believes this project is important since it teaches you how to apply things that you have learned in the curriculum in a useful way, he said.
“For example, in the curriculum we learned probability,” Manukonda said. “You can learn how studies work and how to know if something is statistically significant.”
Senior Trustin Nguyen’s project is based on the memory game called Simon, he said.
“We’re going to each class and giving the game to the person, then giving both positive and negative feedback to see how that affects the score,” Nguyen said.
The group came up with this idea from wanting to test people’s memory ability, Nguyen said.
“We came up with the Simon game, since we played it before,” Nguyen said. “I guess the rest of it was mostly because we were trying to make the experiment more complicated.”
The results showed that there was not much of an effect, but there was a bit of a higher score for people who had encouragement, Nguyen said.
“It wasn’t big enough of a difference that you could say it’s a cause [of the higher score],” Nguyen said.
The results of this project are important because if it were true that encouragement or discouragement really affected someone’s performance on the memory game, it might be useful for when you’re talking to other people or teaching, Nguyen said.
“Maybe someone’s performance would be better if the teacher had a positive kind of enforcement for their kids,” Nguyen said.
The group ran into some problems while doing the experiment, Nguyen said.
“We had a lot of confounding variables because the way we asked everyone wasn’t exactly the same,” Nguyen said. “Sometimes when we’d ask people to come outside [to do the experiment], their friends would walk around as well. These distractions are confounding variables that might have influenced their score.”
The best part of the project was collaborating with the group partners to make the poster and interpreting the data, Nguyen said.
“I liked going over to my friend’s house to make the poster, and figuring out the data, what we wanted to do with the data, and how to put it onto the poster,” Nguyen said.
